Google+ and Small Business

There are many small businesses that don’t have a page on Google+. Why?

Is it because it’s expensive? Nope, it’s free.

Is it because it’s hard to set up? Nope, it’s easier to set up than a Facebook page.

Is it because they are unaware of Google+, or, if they aware of Google+, they consider it unimportant? Ding, ding, ding! I think we have a winner.

If you’re a small business owner, you need to be on Google+ as part of your social media strategy and your customer acquisition strategy.

Why?

Let me count the ways:

Did we mention that it’s its owned by Google? Yes indeed, the same Google that owns what is by far the largest search engine in the world. Businesses on Google+ show up in Google’s business search results. Business pages on Google+ with a few followers and minimal content get indexed quicker in Google Search results. As you know, people use the internet to find things these days.

Google+ Reviews Yup, after people find a business on the internet, they look at whatever reviews are attached to the business. Google+ has a nice, built-in review utility that will give potential customers some confidence about dealing with your business.

Size Google+ has over 550 million active monthly users (yes, over half a billion). Facebook has more, but Google+ is growing at a faster rate.

Google+ Hangouts Are you ready for this? FREE live video conferencing for up to 10 people is yours if you’re on Google+ Pretty handy for employee conferences and pretty handy for customer or supplier roundtables, too.

Useful Data You can use Google+ Ripples and get some very nice data segmentation for free. It is a data visualization graph that shows you how your content has been shared in an intuitive dashboard. You can figure out what your more ardent followers are doing with your content and how they’re using it to advocate on your behalf.

Set up a Google+ page for your small business. If it all looks too daunting, then hire us (or someone like us) to do it for you. Whatever you pay for that effort, it will be well worth it for years to come.

We have not seen any difference since we set up a Google+ page two months ago. We’re still paying a lot of money to a company to run ads for us on the internet, and we hardly see anything from that, either.